Sausalito Marin City district to get attention of civil rights officials, state attorney general

More than 200 people turned out Tuesday night at the Bayside Marin Luther King Jr. Academy campus to hear a report critical of the Sausalito Marin City School District. The state report says the district favors the Willow Creek Academy charter school over the traditional Bayside MLK. (Mark Prado - Marin Independent Journal)

The Marin County superintendent of schools has requested the U.S. Office of Civil Rights and state superintendent of public instruction look into the Sausalito Marin City School District after a report highly critical of its operations.

The 106-page report issued last month by the state Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team concluded the Sausalito Marin City School District board favors a charter school in Sausalito to the detriment of minority children who attend a traditional campus in Marin City. The team will return in six months to see if there have been changes.

Mary Jane Burke, county superintendent of schools, who asked for the review, now has written to federal civil rights officials to determine if an investigation is warranted. Another letter to state Superintendent of Schools Tom Torlakson asks his office to request an opinion from the California attorney general to investigate whether the school board has a conflict of interest. Four of the five school board members have ties to the charter school.

“We have children who have not yet been provided with an education we know that they need,” Burke told more than 200 people who gathered at the Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy multipurpose room to hear from the authors of the state report at a meeting of the county school board Wednesday night.

Many of those who turned out were outraged members of the Willow Creek Academy charter school community, who called into question the accuracy of the state report.

“The report before you is factually incorrect, draws erroneous conclusions and makes recommendations that would hurt the very high-need kids the report aims to protect,” Kurt Weinsheimer, acting board president at the charter school, told the county board. “It also fuels divisiveness in our district when collaboration is what we need to solve the district’s very real education problems.”

Weinsheimer requested the report recommendations pertaining to Willow Creek be rejected by the county board, and allow charter school officials to present their own report.

A top concern among Willow Creek backers is the assertion that a “pattern has been established at WCA to create a segregated school” in part because it limits the number of special education students, according to the report.

Several parents of special-needs children said the charge is not true and others added that in terms of race, the school’s 404-member student body is highly diverse. At Willow Creek 43 percent of students are white, 27 percent are Latino, 12 percent are Asian or Pacific Islander, 8 percent are black, with 10 percent — Filipino, multi-racial and Native American children — falling into the “other” category, according to data provided by school backers at the meeting.

Advertisement

Willow Creek officials also noted 150 Marin City children currently attend the charter, while the enrollment of Bayside MLK is 143 students.

Some of those who supported the state report had no qualms with the educational program at Willow Creek, but said it is partly funded by pulling dollars away from the Bayside MLK by a board that is aligned with the charter school.

Daniel Norbutas, former principal at Bayside MLK who left in 2014, said the school’s successful program was dismantled by the board.

“The board made conscious decisions to eliminate programs at this school,” he said, noting credentialed math, science and English positions were eliminated, while cuts were made to foreign language, art, music, physical education and counseling. “Absolute cuts for the last four years; it has been a continual draw-down of what’s been effective at this school. Subsequently there was increasing funding every single year to Willow Creek.”

The state report called into question two areas of funding: roughly $730,000 for special education the charter does not pay for, and an estimated $235,000 the district provides in furnishings and equipment, utilities, trash service, alarm monitoring and grounds upkeep.

While not illegal, board critics say those dollars could be used for education programs at Bayside MLK. But Willow Creek backers note more is spent on students at Bayside MLK. The district’s most recent budget shows funding per student for instruction is $11,274 at Bayside MLK and $7,100 at Willow Creek.

Josh Barrow, a member of the Sausalito Marin City School Board, said his goal is to address the “appalling achievement gap” in the district at both schools, adding that the state agency that did the report “doesn’t understand our district.”

“I want to fix things,” Barrow, a Marin City resident, told the crowd. “What this report fails to put in context around that achievement gap ... is that the achievement gap exists also at Willow Creek. We all need to fix that.”

County School Board President Dr. Curtis Robinson concluded at the end of the four-hour hearing that change is needed in the local district.

“I’m concerned about the kids that have been left behind, the kids in Marin City that need the extra help to bring equity to the situation here in Marin,” he said. “We need to talk about segregation, racism, institutional racism, even if people don’t understand that the actions that they are taking are to the detriment of another group of people.”

He suggested a merger between the Sausalito Marin City district and the Mill Valley School District to “finish this nonsense of a segregated county.”